A Prank Image Of A Peeing Android Killed Google's Maps Editor

Google has temporarily shut down its Map Maker program while it figures out how to stop people from inserting pranks into its maps, like the image of an Android robot taking a big pee on an Apple logo that prompted an apology last month.

Map Editor team member Pavithra Kanakarajan wrote a blog post explaining how urine-based iconography led to closing the program:

The most recent incident was particularly troubling and unfortunate - a strong user in our community chose to go and create a large scale prank on the Map. As a consequence, we suspended auto-approval and user moderation across the globe, till we figured out ways to add more intelligent mechanisms to prevent such incidents.

Right now, Google is suspending the program starting tomorrow until it can deal with its backlog of edits, since it is manually approving them until it figures out a way to automatically detect pixelated streams of piss.

Trending Stories Right Now

There’s no shortage of data breaches these days, but this one should make you sit up and pay attention. The newly discovered “Collection #1" is the largest public data breach by volume, with 772,904,991 unique emails and 21,222,975 unique passwords exposed.